Kid Patriarch Makes His Move

David Johansen lives in a small, unglamorous apartment on a modest
block near Gramercy Park and/or Max's Kansas City. The building is
fairly new and already a bit shabby; there is no name next to
Johansen's bell. On a recent weekday afternoon I waited while he
matched two socks from his laundry bag, sniffed the armpits of the old
black T-shirt he wanted to wear, put out his show T-shirt and white
show jacket, searched fruitlessly for his turquoise show pants, and
wrote a note to the boys in his band, who were supposed to meet him
there at 4:30 for a gig on the Island. Then we made for the local
Chock Full, where the tuna sandwich is Johansen's current breakfast of
choice. Although as he walked Johansen occasionally fell into the
hand-on-hip stance that so scandalized rock 'n' roll homophobes when
the New York Dolls were making their move five years ago, there was
nothing even faintly outrageous about his black leather jacket and new
jeans or the way he pushed his messy pomp back from his big
forehead. He greeted two or three tradesmen on the street by name,
very much a regular guy. Which seemed like a big change.

I don't think Johansen was ever as irregular as some believed, but
that's not saying much, because he really used to scare the shit out
of people. And those people had their reasons. It was fine to be
moved, as many of us were, by the tenderness and vulnerability that
went with the outrageousness, but Johansen was no pussycat; he was
rather, as I wrote back then, "the kind of person you forgive in
advance for hurting you." Which meant that if you loved his music, you
didn't want to think much about the danger in him. Yet Johansen wasn't
merely outrageous--he was a pied piper of outrageousness. Long before
the Dolls, I'm told, he was one of those charismatics who sees no
difference between shooting the rapids and going with the flow. His
style was always ahead of the style, he'd try anything twice, and he
didn't believe in boredom except as a roundabout means to fun. Even if
he and his band were only playing at their notorious ambisexual
anarchism, their zest in the role was itself a threat. And if fleeing
from the threat was cowardice, it was also good sense. Ambisexual
anarchy is uphill work.

The Dolls are often thought of as the first '70s rock band,
but--much more than the Stooges or the Modern Lovers, say--they were
also the last '60s rock band. Where the Stooges were prophetically
nihilistic and the Modern Lovers prophetically middle-class, the
Dolls' careening quasi-amateurism--complete with chronic lateness and
inebriation and ongoing thrift-shop fashion show--was a defiant
Utopian holdover. It assumed that the world would let them get away
with anything, and not because it was a groovy place, either. If the
blues drove on like a northbound locomotive, the Dolls' raucous
antiswing promised all the deliverance of the BMT at rush hour; their
lyrics avoided visionary conundrums to zero in on urban-youth-dropout
bummers and then doubled the insult by making a joke out of every
personality crisis. Harsh, ecstatic, and riotously funny all at the
same time, they celebrated what was alive in the supposedly, doomed,
ugly lives of "riffraff human beings." Inevitably, the ugliness
offended the diehard hippies who dominated rock in 1973, and the
celebration annoyed the youthcult "survivors" who were ready to settle
for a color TV and three squares a day.

Needless to say, neither the hippies nor the "survivors" had any
more use for the Stooges or the Modern Lovers, say, than for the
Dolls--the audiences of this decade have not thirsted after
Challenging Visions of Our Historical Predicament, in popular culture
or l anywhere else. Competent, predictable professional retrenchment
has prevailed. And because I've made it my mission in life to complain
about this, I was a little put off myself when I went to see David
Johansen's new band at a club called Creation out in West Orange a few
weekends ago.

I was put off rather than surprised because Johansen's solo
album--available in stores since early May and on my turntable for a
month before that--had prepared me for a turn to the conventional. And
I was put off rather than disappointed because it was such a treat to
see him on the way up again. The people who tell you that it'll never
be the same again are right, and so what? Johansen actively likes
living in the present, always has, and right now he finds he can make
music of an emotional strength he's never approached before--the music
of a survivor who doesn't waste time feeling proud of himself for
that. After Mercury gave up on the Dolls in 1974, Johansen kept going
with a stubbornness that was much more than outrageous. Bassist Arthur
Kane had left even before the band's run with Mercury was through, and
soon guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan joined Richard
Hell to form the Heartbreakers. But Johansen and second guitarist Syl
Sylvain continued the Dolls in a version Johansen calls Rent Party,
picking up gigs (and musicians) in places like Florida and New Orleans
and showing up--late, just like always--at local clubs, especially
Max's. They weren't the old Dolls--one exciting but painful night,
Thunders joined an encore and proved how much of the Dolls' sound had
come out of his untutored, unmistakable buzzsaw guitar--but there were
new songs that cried out for a record, especially "Girls" ("I like 'em
seizin' the power"), "Funky but Chic" ("Mama thinks I look pretty
fruity but in jeans I feel rotten"), and "Frenchette" ("I've been to
France/So let's just dance").

No record was likely because Johansen was in hock up to his larynx,
to Mercury and to feuding halves of his former management firm--or so
they all claimed, which was enough to scare the biz away from a
well-known no-sell. Only the intervention of an old admirer, Joe Perry
of Aerosmith--a band that just happened to be making money for the
more powerful of the managerial rivals--extracted him. By then, New
York rock and roll had regained most of the credibility the Dolls'
failure had cost it, and Johansen, whose age was something like 27 or
28, had turned into Kid Patriarch. But in a traditionally patricidal
field of endeavor, this was a curious role. When Johansen came out to
play harp on "My Generation" at Patti Smith's Palladium celebration a
few minutes into 1977, he was all confidence and panache. As climatic
guitar-bashing mayhem ensued, however, he began to seem out of place,
standing there with his hip in one hand and his harmonica in the
other. How quickly they forget. He looked around, ascertained that he
was no longer needed, shrugged, blew us a kiss, and strolled off
stage.

Within a few months the word was that Johansen had formed a new
band with some kids from his home borough, Staten Island, and this was
true as far as it went, although the musicians were a different shade
of green than in the myth--a couple of them had even backed Cherry
Vanilla, a task that could jade anyone. Playing angel was Steve Paul,
a relatively quixotic music entrepreneur who had built a tiny Epic
subsidiary, Blue Sky, around the success of the Winter brothers. The
band worked out at clubs near Paul's home in Connecticut, then went
into the studio with Richard Robinson, solo Lou Reed's first producer
as well as his most recent one. The album took four months to make and
contains nine new Johansen songs, including the best of Rent
Party. It's a fairly wonderful record, in many ways "better" than
either Dolls LP. Sound quality is fuller, Johansen's voice finds more
expressive and musical range, and the rhythm section funks and flows
instead of just pounding along. Guitarists Johnny Rao and Tommy Trask
play genuine solos and respond to Johansen's call. Conceptually,
though, this is a mere singer-with-backup album in a post-garage
mode. Who needs funk and flow--structurally and sonically, the music
packs no distinctive kick.

The club where I saw the band was plusher (carpet on the floor) and
straighter (drug warning in the john) than you'd expect of a venue
showcasing the former David Doll, even in West Orange, and it drew a
crowd to match. For openers, the sound system offered mainstream new
wave--Bowie, Ramones, Patti Smith, Mink DeVille--with one nod to the
underground: "The Kids Are Back," by Syl Sylvain's band, the
Criminals. That was in honor of Syl, who had sat or bounced in with
the band the previous weekend, then agreed to join on at least through
this month's West Coast tour with (headliner) Tom Petty. But while
Syl's machine-gunning guitar antics enlivened the first set, they
weren't enough. Rao, Trask, and bassist Buz Verna--all big, swarthy,
curly-haired, deliberately hoody Italians--moved so stylelessly they
were hard to tell apart. The cacophony created by the count-'em three
guitarists was too controlled, and while the solos were genuine, they
could almost have come off an Aerosmith record. If Johnny Thunders, a
guitar primitive as classic as John Lennon or Jim Gurley, was stuck
back in Paradise Lost (with a band that sounded a lot more like the
Dolls than this one did), I wished Johansen could have gone to someone
equally irrepressible--like Ivan Julian of the Voidoids or maybe
Norman Schoenfeld of the Sic Fucks. Conceptually, this was a mere
singer-with-backup gig.

The singer was also fairly wonderful, of course--lean, almost
athletic, his white jacket-and-jeans set off by the pink hankie
sticking out of a back pocket. He was still very funny--my favorite
bit was the Crazy Guggenheim eyes that went with "look pretty fruity."
And as on the album, his newer songs were open and direct, vocally and
lyrically, in a way the Dolls' camp had never permitted. If the set
seemed a little tight-assed, perhaps that was because there was press
there, not to mention David's mother (a college librarian) and two of
his four sisters, beautiful women who shared his alertness, his good
humor, and his forehead. Indeed, the second show was so tough and
loose that the crowd demanded a second encore. In the course of the
evening, the band played every tune on the new album (many of them
twice), three Dolls oldies, and a number of covers, including the
Supremes' "Love Child," the Four Tops' "Reach Out," and the
Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup."

Johansen has always had great taste in other people's songs, and
these were telling choices. The Dolls' covers--of the Coasters' "Bad
Detective," Bo Diddley's "Pills," even Archie Bell's "Showdown" and
Sonny Boy Williamson's "Don't You Start Me Talking"--were inspired
discoveries that a lot of people (including me on the first two) had
never heard before. These new ones constituted an audacious revival of
a style of schlock soul that is both déclassé--"Mockingbird" may be
cute, but is James Taylor ever gonna risk a Teddy Pendergrass
song?--and dangerously familiar, and while I approve of this as a
move, I must report that only the Foundations song, which seemed
irredeemable in 1969, took on the revelatory edge of a typical Dolls
cover. "Reach Out" was especially problematic. I've never regarded the
Tops' version as knock-out Motown myself, but even those who do will
admit that its clout depended on its freshness--the dramatic epiphany
is an aesthetic effect that tends to wear out--and on Levi Stubb's
vocal equipment. What Johansen offers instead is solid and assertively
commercial with a saving touch of tasteless overstatement. At its
least inspired, all his solo music threatens to turn into something
similar. In West Orange, though "Reach Out" was as uninspired as it
got, and it turns out that David Johansen can almost go
one-on-one with either Dolls LP--after all these years, the Dolls are
still more thrilling formally, but the new album is at least as
satisfying to just put on. If listenability is what Johansen wanted to
achieve, he's made his point.

I never believed the Dolls were going to take over the world, but I
think David Johansen is ready to become some kind of star. The pattern
has already been established by Lou Reed and Nils Lofgren, both of
whom led groups that were too good too soon and then cashed in the
accumulated rep years later. What's more, the evidence indicates that
Johansen, who isn't as perverse as Reed or as limited as Lofgren, will
put together more consistent records and live shows than either. If he
never comes up with another musical conception as exciting as some of
Reed's solo ideas have been, well, what do you want--Reed damn near
invented the music Johansen has exploited so vivaciously, and Johansen
now has something else in mind. He used to wax iconoclastic about his
love for the Brill Building and AM pop, but one reason I doubted the
Dolls' hit potential was that he seemed to have no knowledge of what
actually got on the radio in 1973. The quick acceptance of his new
record by disc jockeys (FM, but that's always where he belonged) in
places like Atlanta and Denver--and New York, where the Dolls got very
little air--is a sign of vitality, not compromise. The world is ready
for David Johansen because David Johansen is ready for the world.

The main reason I wanted to talk to Johansen was to find out how
much he understood of all this, and the answer was plenty. Except for
the usual palaver about how the new record was "better
musically"--meaning closer to an accepted level of competence--he
talked like the best kind of honest careerist. He'd spent four months
in the studio, true, but at least this time he knew what that could
cost, and should the album go bust he won't owe his soul to the
company store. "I don't know if I'm professional," he told me, "but I
try to be. And you know how it used to be--I didn't even know about
it." He talked about how relaxed he was with his band--instead of
biting his nails about who was going to fall over what in the middle
of "Showdown," he could even eat or sleep between shows. "You go on
and you do the job, and you savor that. I didn't know exactly what I
wanted to do after the Dolls, but I certainly had plans to make things
run smoothly when I had the opportunity."

Of course, what made Johansen bite his nails was what put all us
Dolls fans on the edges of our seats, where fans ought to be. But
there's something to Johansen's feeling that his new music can
"encompass more emotion." In the wake of a bitter breakup with his
wife, Cyrinda Fox--it's a long time, but he still tightens up when you
stray too near the subject--he's writing his first real love (or
heartbreak) songs, showstoppers like "Donna" and "Pain in My Heart."
"When I was with the Dolls I didn't really know too much about love,"
he told me, and connected this to his understanding that the Dolls'
structure left him limited room for self-expression, As magical as the
Dolls' acting out was, it's hard to blame him for feeling that he was
stuck in a role: "I knew who I was, but I wasn't positive."

At around 4:30, we paid for the tuna sandwich and walked back to
the shabby new building. David Johansen had a date with his boys, and
he wasn't going to be late.